AR Classics is our collection of widely-read analyst relations articles which continue to be popular years after their publication.
You read the headline correctly; Forrester and Gartner should never be considered Tier 1. Yes, yes, Gartner is the industry behemoth, and Forrester is likely the number two firm for enterprise end users, but that does not make them automatically Tier 1 for the purpose of creating a ranked and tiered analyst list. In the…
Given the current FIFA scandal, it’s interesting to note that it is a year since the most serious call yet for the regulation of industry analysts. Phil Fersht argues against the growing demands placed on vendors by analysts’ requests for data. He raises the argument that analysts who beseech such information must have reduced access…
Corporations pay technology analysts $15 billion a year for unbiased technology research. But many common analyst practices look suspiciously like conflicts of interest. By Christopher Koch For many business executives, technology analysts are the consiglieres of the Fortune 1000. These trusted advisers seem like the voices of objectivity, offering unbiased wisdom about the endless outpouring…
For several years in the 1990s I shared a household with an old golden retriever named Murphy. Murphy had ESP. He’d know exactly where one of us would want to be in five minutes. He would position himself right there, in the way. It didn’t matter if the place was the refrigerator, the best chair…
2014 was the breakout year for freemium analyst firms. It’s fundamentally ended the fantasy that only Gartner and Forrester were “deal-maker or breaker” firms. An excellent illustration of that is the chart here, which uses data from the Analyst Value Survey. It shows the companies where the demand-side and supply-side respondents gave the most different answers to…
When Ed Gyurko first approached industry analysts as a marketer for the technology company he then worked for, he did it all wrong. He says, “I mistakenly thought that that industry analyst relations were just like media relations. I thought, ‘Well, ok I’ll make a few calls.’” Although you need to handle them very differently,…
It’s Not That Simple, writes Efrem Mallach. Since World War II, the growth of management consulting has literally skyrocketed. At the beginning of this decade management consulting was a $32 billion industry. In the five ensuing years its economic growth had doubled.(n1) And nowhere has the impact of this growth made more of a mark…
Admit it. You’re an advice junkie. Need proof? The industry analyst business rakes in more than $I billion annually, mostly from IS managers who seek advice on trends, vendors and products. Consultants take in even more for advice tailored to specific situation. If you spend that much on advice, you pay attention to it. Vendors…